Jack Cossid (Yankela Chossid), age 9, at
The Talmud Torah - Hebrew School in Yurburg

(from the 1927 postcard)

Yankela Chossid, born in Yurburg in 1917, was one of 11 children
of Lazar Chossid, a builder in Yurburg. As teenager in Yurburg,
Yankela worked at the Commerce Bank as an assistant to the bank
president Shmerel Bernstein. When he immigrated to the United States
in 1937, he became Jack Cossid. He joined a brother in Chicago, where
he settled. Jack joined the US Army during World War II, became an
interpreter due to his extensive knowledge of European languages;
Jack is fluent in German, Lithuanian, Yiddish, English and some
Russian. During the war he worked with prisoners of war in South
Dakota and Rockford Illinois. After the war Jack ran a successful dry
cleaning business in Chicago until his retirement in 1987. Jack and
his wife Linda have two daughters and four grand daughters.

Of the eleven children in Jack's family, only five survived the
war; one sister survived the concentration camps. Six of his siblings
and his parents were murdered in Yurburg by the Lithuanians under the
encouragement of the Nazis in the summer of 1941. Among the six were
a younger sister and a set of twin brothers.